Deep Time: Reclaim the Night

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Wisconsin Public Radio

Prx, Philosophy, Knowledge, Wpr, Ttbook, Wisconsin, Society & Culture

4.7 • 844 Ratings

🗓️ 21 December 2024

⏱️ 52 minutes

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Summary

The longest nights of the year are here, but how many of us will see them? The global spread of light pollution is making it harder to experience dark skies and natural darkness. Learning how to reconnect with the planet’s ancient nocturnal rhythms can be profoundly restorative. Nature writers and darkness activists tell us what we’re missing.

Deep Time is a series all about the natural ecologies of time from To The Best Of Our Knowledge and the Center for Humans and Nature. We'll explore life beyond the clock, develop habits of "timefulness" and learn how to live with greater awareness of the many types of time in our lives.

Original Air Date: December 21, 2024

Interviews In This Hour:
Listening to the song of the night — Adjusting our eyes to wonders of the nocturnal world

Guests:
Sam Lee, Leigh Ann Henion

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Our ancestors knew the night in a way that very few of us do now,
0:09.2	and it really wasn't that long ago.
0:11.7	My own grandmother, raising young children in rural Missouri in the 1930s, didn't have electric light.
0:18.2	She could see the Milky Way from her front porch. When we lit up the night
0:23.7	and banished darkness, what did we lose as a culture? I'm Anne Strange Shams, and in this episode
0:30.4	of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we'll make the case for reclaiming the night.
0:38.2	From WPR.
0:43.9	It's to the best of our knowledge.
0:45.7	I'm Anne-Strain Champs.
1:04.0	There's an ancient tradition practiced every year by small groups of people in England at night. What time is it?
1:09.0	Well, we usually move at around 11 o'clock, maybe just before,
1:15.2	so darkness will have completely envelop the land.
1:19.9	This is musician Sam Lee.
1:22.3	He leads Nightingale tours.
1:28.3	We gather up, and yes, we're doing it in company.
1:31.3	There's a group of us, about 40 of us.
1:34.3	We don't use torches.
1:37.3	We do it in silence, and we walk in single file through the woods down these paths.
1:43.3	It's a kind of, it's another world.
1:47.0	However much you know the forest,
1:50.0	when in the darkness,
1:52.0	this completely different personality of the land emerges.
	...

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